The King: Netflix Starts Production for Shakespeare Inspired Movie

June 3, 2018 steezy

The King appears to be one of Netflix’s most promising projects, a prestige movie that’s brandishing the starring role of the recent Call Me By Your Name Oscar nominee, Timothée Chalamet, along with names like Joel Edgerton, Robert Pattinson and Ben Mendelsohn to boot.

David Michôd will direct, having just helmed Netflix’s Brad Pitt-starring fact-based military drama, War Machine. However, he’s best known for directing the (current TNT television series-adapted) 2010 crime drama, Animal Kingdom, in which cast members Joel Edgerton and Ben Mendelsohn co-starred. Interestingly enough, Michôd will work off a script that he co-wrote with Edgerton.

Now, the streaming giant officially confirms details about this exciting streaming cinematic endeavor.

The King Netflix Release Date

Netflix has announced that The King will commence production in the U.K. on June 1, eyeing a release for 2019. It has also confirmed the cast and creative personnel. As the official log line reads:

“Inspired by elements of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V, a young, disgraced prince, Hal inherits the crown and must learn what it means to be a king, guided by his one true friend, Falstaff.”

To elaborate, the movie adapts William Shakespeare’s quartet of historically-dramatized plays, known by scholars as the “Henriad” (a play on The Iliad,) or, the “Henry Tetralogy,” which consists of Richard II, in which Hal’s father, Henry Bolingbroke usurps the throne, the duo of Henry IV Part I and Part II, chronicling Prince Hal’s rise, and Henry V, showing the now-king Henry making the famous “band of brothers” speech before leading England’s army against the French in the famed Battle of Agincourt.

However, Netflix’s The King will attempt to modernize the Bard’s War of the Roses-era chronicles – likely omitting the “thou” and “thy” vernacular – while still focusing on the rise to power of young Hal (Chalamet), who enters the story as a slacker and screw-up of a prince, who’s quite far from his eventual battlefield-born glory as King Henry V, spending his days hanging out with the drunken scoundrel knight, Falstaff (Edgerton).